Ancient Mesopotamia at the Dawn of Civilization

The Evolution of an Urban LandscapeBy GUILLERMO ALGAZE

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Copyright © 2008 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-01377-0

Contents

List of Illustrations…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….ixAcknowledgments………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….xiPrologue………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..xiiiCHAPTER 1. The Sumerian Takeoff……………………………………………………………………………………………………1Natural and Created Landscapes…………………………………………………………………………………………………….1A Reversal of Fortune…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….3Forthcoming Discussions…………………………………………………………………………………………………………..6CHAPTER 2. Factors Hindering Our Understanding of the Sumerian Takeoff…………………………………………………………………11The Material Limits of the Evidence………………………………………………………………………………………………..11Conceptual Problems………………………………………………………………………………………………………………14Methodological Problems…………………………………………………………………………………………………………..24CHAPTER 3. Modeling the Dynamics of Urban Growth…………………………………………………………………………………….28Growth As Diversification…………………………………………………………………………………………………………30Growth As Specialization………………………………………………………………………………………………………….33Growth Situated………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….36Growth Institutionalized………………………………………………………………………………………………………….37CHAPTER 4. Early Mesopotamian Urbanism: Why?………………………………………………………………………………………..40Environmental Advantages………………………………………………………………………………………………………….40Geographical Advantages…………………………………………………………………………………………………………..50Comparative and Competitive Advantage………………………………………………………………………………………………63CHAPTER 5. Early Mesopotamian Urbanism: How?………………………………………………………………………………………..64The Growth of Early Mesopotamian Urban Economies…………………………………………………………………………………….64The Uruk Expansion……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….68Multiplier Effects……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….73CHAPTER 6. The Evidence for Trade………………………………………………………………………………………………….93CHAPTER 7. Early Mesopotamian Urbanism in Comparative Perspective……………………………………………………………………..100Evidentiary Biases……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….100Florescent Urbanism in Alluvial Mesopotamia…………………………………………………………………………………………102The Primacy of Warka: Location, Location, Location…………………………………………………………………………………..109Aborted Urbanism in Upper Mesopotamia………………………………………………………………………………………………117CHAPTER 8. The Synergies of Civilization……………………………………………………………………………………………123Propinquity and Its Consequences…………………………………………………………………………………………………..123Technologies of the Intellect……………………………………………………………………………………………………..127The Urban Revolution Revisited…………………………………………………………………………………………………….140CHAPTER 9. Conclusion: The Mesopotamian Conjuncture………………………………………………………………………………….143EPILOGUE Early Sumerian Civilization: A Research Agenda………………………………………………………………………………151Agency………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….152Paleoenvironment…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………154Trade…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..155Households and Property…………………………………………………………………………………………………………..157Excavation and Survey…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….159Paleozoology…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….161Mortuary Evidence………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..162Chronology………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………163The Early Uruk Problem……………………………………………………………………………………………………………164APPENDIX 1. Surveyed Early/Middle Uruk Sites in the Mesopotamian Alluvium Organized by Size and Presumed Functional Category…………………167APPENDIX 2. Surveyed Late Uruk Sites in the Mesopotamian Alluvium Organized by Size and Presumed Functional Category………………………..173Notes…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..177Reference List…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..193Source List……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..221Index…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..225

Chapter One

The Sumerian Takeoff

Natural and Created Landscapes

Economic geographers seeking to understand how substantial variations in population concentration and economic activity are created across the landscape correctly note that, except in cases of colonial imposition, such variations are always the result of cumulative processes whereby initial natural advantages of particular sites or areas are extended and compounded by socially created technologies and institutions delivering increasing returns to scale. In this manner, they argue, self-reinforcing processes of accumulation, exchange, agglomeration, and innovation are created that ultimately determine the varying developmental trajectories of different regions and the location, number, and rate of growth of cities within them (Krugman 1991, 1995, 1998a; Pred 1966).

The historian William Cronon (1991) vividly illustrates this process in reference to the expansion of Chicago in the nineteenth century, as outlined in his book Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. Cronon insightfully distinguishes between two settings in which the evolution of the city took place. The first was its “natural landscape,” entirely determined by geography and environment. The second was what he terms the “created landscape,” which results from human innovations and institutions that substantially alter and reshape a city’s natural setting and significantly expand the advantages of its location for human settlement. Cronon argues that in the modern world the created landscape has become more important than the natural landscape as a determinant of urban location and regional developmental rates. Specifically, he sees Chicago’s initial role as a Great Lakes port, a role entirely determined by geography of the Great Lakes area, as eventually overshadowed by its later role as a railroad hub, a secondary but economically more important role that emerged as part of the “created landscape.” Chicago became the early economic center of its region because it was a port. Railroads later used Chicago as a hub precisely because it already was the early economic center of its region, and thereby helped make its initial centrality that much greater. In so doing, Chicago surpassed its regional rival, Saint Louis, and became the undisputed commercial and cultural center serving as the “gateway” to the American West (see also Kruman 1996a).

New York City presents us with a similar case, according to the economist Paul Krugman (Fujita and Krugman 2004, 141). Its initial growth stems from its natural location at the juncture of the Hudson River and the Atlantic Ocean, which positioned the city early on as one of several important hubs of transatlantic trade along the Eastern Seaboard (together with Boston, Baltimore, and Philadelphia). Because it already was a hub of maritime trade in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, commercial interests in New York City were in an ideal position to lobby the New York state legislature to construct the Erie Canal, a 363-milelong series of interlocking artificial waterways built within the relatively short span of eight years that linked the cities of Buffalo on the shores of Lake Erie and Albany on the Upper Hudson River (Cornog 2000). Upon its completion in 1825, the canal allowed unimpeded barge traffic between New York City and the Great Lakes via the Hudson River.

The benefits of the canal to the city were immediate: its barges and boats exponentially lowered transport cost of agricultural and other commodities to the city’s merchants (chap. 4) and, in so doing, provided them with important advantages vis–vis competing commercial interests in Boston, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. Indeed, within fifteen years of the opening of the canal, New York City had eclipsed all of its competitors on the Eastern Seaboard, becoming the busiest seaport in all of the United States; and within thirty years of the opening of the canal the population of the city had quadrupled, as New York became the largest and most populous urban center in the country-exactly what the canal builders and financiers had intended. As New York City achieved front-rank status in the mid-nineteenth century, in large part because of its increasingly disproportionate share of the inland and maritime trade at the time, economies of scale resulting from the city’s larger size made many of its other related industries (notably finance and communication) more competitive than those of its by then smaller rivals, further accentuating the city’s centrality and further accelerating its growth.

A Reversal of Fortune

The insights of Cronon and Krugman about the ways in which natural and created landscapes determine, reinforce, and compound each other in modern cities and their surrounding areas are applicable to earlier cases of urban transformation. A case in point appears to be the crystallization of early Sumerian civilization in the alluvial lowlands of the Tigris-Euphrates rivers of southern Mesopotamia during the Uruk period, which is radiocarbon-dated ca. 3900/3800 to ca. 3200/3100 BC (Wright and Rupley 2001; Rupley 2003). As Tony Wilkinson (2001) and Joan Oates (2001) have recently noted, this emergence took place after centuries, if not millennia, in which the developmental trajectory of polities in the southern Mesopotamian alluvium had hardly differed from that of neighboring societies across the ancient Near East. This becomes clear when we compare data pertinent for the fifth and fourth millennia BC produced by disparate surveys and excavations across northern and southern Mesopotamia, southwestern Iran, and the Levant.

Briefly summarized, these data indicate that during the second half of the fifth millennium, Late Ubaid settlements in southern Mesopotamia (Oates 1983) were entirely comparable in terms of both scale (roughly measured by settlement extent) and level of intrasite differentiation to those of contemporary (Middle Susiana 3-Late Susiana) societies in the Susiana plain of Khuzestan (Delougaz and Kantor 1996; H. Wright 1984; Wright and Johnson 1975) and also appear to have also been similar in scale to contemporary settlements in the Upper Euphrates, Upper Khabur, and Upper Tigris basins of Upper Mesopotamia (Kouchoukos and Hole 2003; Wilkinson 2000b, 2003a). Moreover, the Late Ubaid settlements of southern Iraq are comparable in scale to contemporary Ghassulian phase Chalcolithic settlements in the Jordan Valley (Bourke 2001, 111-16).

A degree of differentiation in regional developmental rates starts to become apparent in some portions of southwest Asia at the transition from the fifth to the fourth millennia but this is mostly due to collapse of the indigenous societies in the Levant at the end of the Chalcolithic period, a process that is still not well understood (Levy 1998, 241-43). Elsewhere in southwest Asia, however, development continued unabated at this time. This is certainly the case in portions of “Greater Mesopotamia,” where “protourban” polities of considerable extent and complexity were beginning to arise, first, in the parts of the Upper Khabur plains of northern Syria and, soon thereafter, within the alluvial lowlands of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in southern Iraq, and, to a lesser extent, in Susiana (Adams 1981; Kouchoukos and Hole 2003; Nissen 1993; Oates 2001; Ur, Kaarsgard, and Oates 2007; Wilkinson 2000b, 2003a; H. Wright 1984, 2001).

Yet, only a few centuries later, by the second half of the fourth millennium, Upper and Lower Mesopotamia were no longer developing largely in tandem or at comparable rates. The available evidence clearly shows that by this time polities in the Tigris-Euphrates alluvial delta had surpassed their immediate neighbors and potential competitors across the Near East (and the world) in terms of scale, degree of internal differentiation, and extent of hierarchy present in surrounding settlement grids (Adams 1981). By the third quarter of the fourth millennium, if not earlier, southern Mesopotamia became a dynamic hub of interaction, where multiple thriving and competing city-states were forged into a politically balkanized but culturally homogeneous and expansive civilization that extended at this point into southwestern Iran and parts of Upper Mesopotamia (Algaze 2005a, 144-45; but see H. Wright 1998 for a contrary opinion).

In contrast, the early indigenous protourban sites of Upper Mesopotamia, such as Tell Brak, were in decline throughout the second half of the fourth millennium (Emberling 2002), just as a number of colonies of Uruk settlers of southern origin were established at strategic locations across the northern plains (Algaze 1993, 2001b; Gibson et al. 2002; G. Schwartz 2001; Stein 1999a, 1999b, 2001). While indigenous societies continued to flourish across the north at this time (Frangipane 2002), including in areas surrounding the intrusive southern settlements, the remaining Late Chalcolithic polities of Upper Mesopotamia as a group were no longer comparable in either scale or complexity to the much more developed polities of southern Mesopotamia, where by then a veritable revolution in human spatial, social, political, and economic organization had taken place.

Early southern Mesopotamian (Sumerian) civilization thus represents a dramatic “takeoff”-a decisive shift in favor of southern Mesopotamia of the balance of urbanization, sociopolitical complexity, and economic differentiation that had existed across the ancient Near East until the onset of the fourth millennium. Why did this shift take place? Could a comparable shift have occurred anywhere in the ancient Near East, or were there factors specific to southern Mesopotamia alone that made it more probable that the shift would occur there rather than elsewhere? If the latter, what processes help account for the emergence of civilization in the south? And, finally, why did this emergence take place when it did, in the second half of the fourth millennium, and not before?

Forthcoming Discussions

In the chapters that follow I attempt to answer some of these questions by focusing on aspects of how wealth was produced and distributed in the earliest Sumerian city-states. To be sure, as Lamberg-Karlovsky (1995, 2001), Henry Wright (2001), and others (e.g., Collins 2000) have repeatedly warned us, phenomena as complex as the emergence of early cities and the institutionalization of the first despotic governments cannot be fully explained by changes in economic factors alone. This admonition wholly applies to the Sumerian case: unquestionably, the initial growth of early Mesopotamian civilization also entailed equally important, but more difficult to document, concurrent transformations in conceptions of the social order prevalent until then. At a minimum, these must have included new understandings about the nature of rank, the duties owed by the ruled to their rulers, and possibly, new conceptualizations about the nature of property as well (North and Thomas 1973).

In addition, as any student of Max Weber will readily appreciate, social transformations of any consequence are also structured by culturally bound forms of perceiving and comprehending the world, which determine whether individuals and institutions recognize (or not) opportunities for gain in their natural and social environments, and whether they act (or not) on those opportunities. Accordingly, culture helps explain why some societies grow (or not) at an accelerated rate compared to their neighbors, or at their expense. For this reason, cultural factors are often seen, correctly, as having as key a role as economic forces in structuring asymmetrical rates of urban development across the world (Dymski 1996; Martin 1999), and without a doubt culture also plays a central role in structuring the location, form, and layout of early cities wherever they appeared (e.g., Wheatley 1971; Kolata 1983; Marcus 1983; Cowgill 2000), including the ancient Near East.

Finally, if the available ethnohistoric record documenting the transition from chiefdoms to states across the world teaches us anything pertinent about the emergence of early Near Eastern civilizations it is that however crucial economic factors may be in determining the locations where states may (or may not) emerge, in the ultimate analysis what determines whether states actually do arise at those favored locales is the will of particular self-aggrandizing leaders to conquer their neighbors, often while cloaked in the mantle of an expansive religious ideology (Flannery 1999; Wright 2006). Again, early Mesopotamia was no exception to this pattern, as shown by the fact that much of the iconography of the nascent Uruk city-states focuses on a larger-than-life male figure who is repeatedly depicted as a leader in both battle and ritual (Bahrani 2002; Schmandt-Besserat 1993, 2007; Winter 2007).

However, documenting either the political or military strategies taken by individual actors in their quest for power or the weight of ideological and cultural factors in the crystallization of early pristine civilizations is always inherently difficult because of the nature of the evidence at our disposal, which is commonly insufficient to the task (chap. 2 and epilogue). This is indeed the case when we turn to fourth-millennium Mesopotamia, where available evidence allows us to make inferences about broadly defined categories of people and institutions but precludes us from reconstructing in any detail the actions of specific individuals, the historical context of early cities in the area, or even the “weltanschauung” of the first urban populations. Accordingly, the perspective of this book is much narrower: taking advantage of the natural strengths of archaeological data, I focus on economic change in fourth-millennium Sumerian cities as a proxy for the wider set of transformations entailed by the rise of early Mesopotamian civilization. More specifically, I seek to elucidate the economic variables underlying the processes of urban growth and socioeconomic differentiation in southern Mesopotamia of the Middle and Late Uruk periods (ca. 3600-3200/3100 BC) and to shed light on why developmental processes of comparable scale and resilience appear to have been absent in neighboring societies at the time.

Chapter 2 details available evidence that bears on the initial emergence of urban civilization in the Mesopotamian alluvium and outlines important conceptual and methodological problems that, in my opinion, hinder our understanding of the role of economic processes leading to that emergence and that, if left uncorrected, may well limit the kinds of future research that are needed to fully understand the Sumerian takeoff. Without a doubt, these limitations will ultimately only be circumvented by a substantial amount of imaginative and carefully designed new research, and some possible avenues of investigation toward this end are suggested in the epilogue. However, it may be possible to look at existing data with new eyes by framing them in the context of pertinent models of modern urban growth derived from the work of economists and economic geographers. Outlined in chapter 3, these models are intended only as testable propositions, allowing us, at the same time, to speculate about the meaning of current evidence and structure future research designs to better understand the conjuncture of environmental forces, social institutions, and economic mechanisms that made it likely that the earliest urban civilization of southwest Asia would arise first in southern Mesopotamia and not elsewhere.

Chapter 4 focuses on the environmental side of this conjuncture. It explores the unique ecology and geography of the alluvial lowlands of the Tigris-Euphrates rivers during the fifth and fourth millennia BC. The former gave early polities in the area important advantages in agricultural productivity and subsistence resource resilience not possessed by potential rivals on their periphery, while the latter gave them enduring cost advantages in the accumulation and distribution of resources, both local and foreign, as a result of water transport. Derived entirely from what Cronon refers to as the “natural landscape,” these advantages created opportunities and incentives that made it both possible and probable that early Mesopotamian elites would see trade as a particularly viable way to legitimize and expand their unequal access to resources and power.

(Continues…)

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